Mostly Software

  • Wednesday

    • Installed a powerhead in the sump, purely to circulate around the return pump. This will prevent detritus from settling, reducing the necessary sump cleanings. Only ~5W. Set up the power and alarms on the apex for this connection.
    • Breathwork. I’ve found that focusing on diaphragm breathing, deep belly, makes the exercise a bit less efficient. If I just focus on large breaths, chest being fine, I get more lightheaded and tingly during the sympathetic portion, able to hold breath longer and more meditative during the parasympathetic part, etc.
    • Added Makefile Tools vscode extension.
    • Supercontest.
      • Created 10 tickets (147-156). Will do 6 before 2022-2023 season. First game is next thursday, 8 days.
      • Renewed the cert. Remember that certbot does this, but not during the offseason when you go >6 months without touching the app.
      • Just run docker-compose restart from code/infra (this is not in the app containers, it’s the nginx and letsencrypt companion containers that proxy the traffic in front of the apps (sbsc and bmahlstedt.com) while managing certs.
      • Closed https://gitlab.com/bmahlstedt/supercontest/-/issues/152.
      • Surprisingly, first attempt at build succeeded. IIRC I am running a sexytools variant to resolve and constrain everything 100%.
      • Set up desktop to work on supercontest (ssh keys, then added the ssh add in bash_profile, etc) – previous years were on the fedora laptop. Happy to be back in ubuntu (albeit wsl).
    • Resume.
      • Reorganized gdrive a bit. Removed old segments from resume, added new, updated others.
      • Overall, cleaned a bit. Later professional CVs should be summaries, don’t have much space to deepdive on a sheet anymore.
      • Updated the abridged version as well.
      • Uploaded to linkedin (for my own ability on apps, not public). My blog points to linkedin.
      • Added a few Featured posts on the profile to hoist to the top.
    • Remember Reg A. The SEC requires a ton of paperwork for the offering/sale of securities. If you file Reg A, it’s an exemption that’s a bit less stringent. It’s ultimately a convenience, but you must file it first. You are limited on a few things (<$20M in security sales in a year for tier 1).
    • Remember Reg D. Put simply, it’s Reg A but for private equity instead of public offerings.

  • Tuesday

    • Watched Magnus on Lex Fridman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZO28NtkwwQ.
    • Ducati.
      • Took the bike to motogrrl, safe trip albeit pending a lot of maintenance.
      • Going to leave it there for ~3 months until my garage reopens. Paid for Sept and Oct.
      • At that point, need to do direct maintenance and 7500mi maintenance (rn it’s 6910). Primarily chain, rotors/pads, and oil.
      • Motogrrl is great. Williamsburg. 2 tiers: Regular and Full Throttle. Regular is $175/mo, longterm storage. FT is $325/mo, 24/7 access. You get a shared workspace with lifts, equipment, replacement parts, tire stations, washing stations, more.
      • Great garage overall. Nice perks. Wifi, printer, restrooms, shared sound system, whatsapp group, two wheel tuesdays, etc.
      • Did not leave cover or keys or helmet. Did leave the bike on my tender.
      • Sidenote: all NY airports have free motorcycle parking, just like LAX!
    • TWTR ~40. Should I place more puts…
    • Single-cost hardware for starlink is $600 right now? (residential)
    • Hetzner (german EC2) proclaimed today that running eth nodes on its cloud systems is not allowed. 15% of all eth nodes globally run on Hetzner.
      • Won’t be a killer, but still annoying. 55% of nodes run on AWS. I imagine the Hetzner 15% will just shift to EC2.
    • SEF = Swap Execution Facility. The license for any platform trading swaps. Introduced by Dodd-Frank 2010.
    • Tons of deepthink on the startup.

  • Monday

    • Bloomberg Opinion pieces across the board need to hop off Elon. Matt Levine. Every single day. Are you becoming the tabloid of financial news? Cover prominent content that affects my portfolio, not my yearbook.
    • Confirmed the ETH staking yield comparisons. Lido’s stETH will increase in quantity if held. Current APY is 3.9% (set by Lido, the liquid staker). If you deposit into a vault on yearn (like Curve stETH), you don’t get double yield. You get the yield of the vault only (which is 6.23% rn). You don’t get the stETH rewards, since you’re not holding stETH. It’s nonrehypothecable (just wanted to use that ridiculous word).
    • Renewed USPS digital signature.
    • Aquarium.
      • Dremeled out the autofeeder circle into an ellipse so all droppings pass through rather than accumulating on the plastic aquarium lid.
      • Providing my own rodi saltwater saves a little over $100 per maintenance visit. Will do in future. Providing my own poly, carbon, and sock filters saves a few bucks on each too.
      • Ordered pink and purple (each individually with 7 species) coralline algae in a bottle.
      • Cleaned sump with the vacuum myself. Manhattan aquariums charges the full $150 for this service. Bought powerhead (1050gph) to circulate sump and not let detritus settle. This is not just good for cleanup: improves the heater, return pump, supplements, probe readings, etc.
    • Charged the old ducati battery fully and reinstalled on the bike. Successful ignition.
      • Attached new ring connectors permanently, terminating in an easy-access charge port near the left knee (rear spring).
      • Now I can tend overnight, maintain through winter, whatever. Plug in and leave alone. Deltran 750mA. Charges dead->full in under 24 hours, or keeps safely charged at top.

  • Saturday

    Read Healing Back Pain – The Mind Body Connection. Sarno’s method. Notes:

    • TMS  = Tension Myositis Syndrome.
    • Caused by fear, anxiety, expectation, anger, risk. All producing tension. For the most part, subconsciously.
    • These repressed emotions reduce blood flow to muscles, nerves, tendons, ligaments.
    • The autonomic nervous system controls all this, (heart rate, breathing, blood, etc). So while the feelings may not be based in reality, there is still a physical impact on the body.
    • Basically, the pain is in your brain. Act normally, live as though you’re pain-free, and you will be. Mind over matter.
    • In some cases your brain may produce physical pain to distract from emotional anxiety. It’s a defensive maneuver, in the mind’s eye.
    • Action: Talk to your brain. Don’t be afraid of chronic injury. Deal with any repressed anxiety directly. Fake it till you make it. Convince yourself you’re not injured.
    • Action: Resume all regular physical activity. Do not live the rest of your life with a phobia of certain movements. Stop physical therapy – it psychologically limits you.
    • Counter: I pushed through tennis elbow, continued lifting, and definitely had a longer slower recovery process because of this.
    • Counter: As soon as I could walk without crippling pain, I rejoined the gym during disc recovery. I felt that the healing process went sometimes faster, sometimes slower. I do mindfulness/breathwork and lived a very stress-free life during my disc journey. I engaged in normal physical regiments without hesitation. No victim mentality. Still took years.
    • Overall: Very woo-woo. Agree with the general idea of pushing through injury psychologically, but physical science trumps.
    • Much of the book is hedging against majority skeptical response.
    • Getting good rest, going to therapy, not being anxious/fearful – those are inevitably going to improve a recovery program.

  • Friday

    • SpaceX partnership with t-mobile: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/elon-musks-spacex-t-mobile-us-plan-boost-cellular-coverage-space-2022-08-26/.
      • Don’t need cell towers. Can send SMS, MMS, and all normal wifi+data services.
      • Coverage in areas without cell service.
    • Looked at ufc 281 presale for msg in nov! ~$500-$5000 rn.
    • JPowell keynote at jackson hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKdME43FVQQ.
      • #1 goal is inflation reduction. Price stability. Growth is going to slow and take the hit.
    • Sam Harris on Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgL1bnAvo4Q
    • Keep your website under 15KB. TCP starts (most) communications with 10 packets in a round trip, each packet being 1500B.
    • The “marriage problem” – n candidates, must make a decision after each (lol). When to optimally stop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
    • Staked the eth on lido so it’s withdrawable. You can’t stake eth on coinbase in NY yet. Currently 3.9% APR, whereas eth’s direct stake APR is 4.2. Lido takes a little over 7% for the activation queue for eth validators. Then they take another 10% of the earnings. So actual total is something like 3.5% APR. Remember you get stETH, which is 1:1 for ETH, and you earn the staking rewards daily, as an increased quantity of stETH holdings.
      • Did the same a few months back and rehypothecated the steth into a curve vault for additional APY. Will compare later.
    • Manhattan aquariums first maintenance. Very helpful. Took a couple pages of notes but no need to copy here; they’re in the gdoc log. Sand in magnetic brushes, salt creep, acrylic cleaner, leave overflow alone as turf scrubber, engineer goby size, trident labs ICP test, PAR testing, NY tap water low ph, clam canary, carbon and poly filters, purple and coralline algae, kenya tree and pulsing xenia, more.
    • Captains of Crush ratings: https://ironmind.com/product-info/ironmind-grippers/captains-of-crush-grippers/
      • Only ~300 people globally have been certified on the 3.
      • ~25 for 3.5.
      • ~5 for 4.
      • I’m able to do 2, nearly 2.5.
    • Removed the battery from the ducati and connected it to a charged stanley fatmax professional power station. This mobile unit is meant for jump starting, and does run at ~12.V, but I’m a little wary of using it as a charger. Doesn’t have the maintenance detection, trickle capability etc.
      • Ordered a new battery (yuasa yt7b-bs) and a tender (deltran junior) for my own purpose later.
      • 2018 959 is lead-calcium, not lithium.

  • Thursday

    PFOF. Refresher on Payment for Order Flow.

    • Prereq: Remember (loosely) a public exchange (eg NYSE) = specialist = receives all bids and asks and matches them, like an order book matching both sides. A market maker (eg Jane Street) = wholesaler = holds assets themselves to provide liquidity, posts both the bid prices and ask prices themselves, then manages (many) single-sided transactions against their inventory.
    • Key piece: The randomness of the retail investor, expecting the trade decisions to be more on the uninformed side. Most positions traded directly with the exchange are (more than 50% coin flip) informed, and therefore the market maker acting as a middleman to fill bids and asks would (more often than not) LOSE money as the market moved. The trade was smart (usually large, and by institutional investors), and happened before the asset moved in the undesirable direction, so the wholesaler who intermediated the transaction lost money. Because of this, spreads between bid and ask on public exchanges are quite large.
    • So brokers like robinhood will work directly with market makers like citsec. They give the buyer a lower price, give the seller a higher price, pocket a bit of the difference, and give a bit back to the broker for sending them the execution. As long as those 4 sum up to less than the spread on the public exchange, all 4 parties win (by cutting the exchange out).
    • Assuming the public exchange bid/ask spread is 15 cents, and the wholesaler spread is 5 cents, the actual distribution of the remainder is about 80% price improvement for the retail buyer/seller, and 20% PFOF back to the broker. So the broker makes 2 cents (PFOF), the retail buyer and seller make about 4 cents each (compared to if their trade was executed on an exchange), and the wholesaler makes 5 cents (the spread).
    • Obviously, the naive assumption is that WITH this flow, the market maker will front-run your trade, make money, and give some back to the broker. So those 2 parties benefit, and the retail investors (buyer+seller) have been shafted. This has been disproven many times empirically (every study on PFOF price improvement) as well as lawfully; the SEC polices this explicitly.
    • This kickback to the broker is also what allows them to subsidize the fees, making transactions free. Another benefit to retail. Without PFOF, we’d have to pay commissions again.
    • Fun fact: this study found citsec provides the best price improvement for the retail investor: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4189239. Tell that to reddit…
    • Why don’t all orders go through wholesalers then? Institutional investors will always exist to make better-informed trades. These have to go somewhere. Exchanges bear the majority of this volume, and its associatively higher risk (for the exchange), so the spreads in that location correspondingly increase.

  • Wednesday

    • Some random research today along with some review of basics.
    • Hidden Road (https://hiddenroad.com/) offers financial services: prime brokerage, trading, loans/financing options, clearing, fx, more. They do fiat but mostly crypto.
    • Remember recourse loans. Say the lender collects ALL the collateral after the borrower defaults, but the collateral is now worth less than the loan value. Recourse means that the lender can go after the individual for the remainder. They’re personally liable to make up the remainder (wages, other accounts, home, whatever).
      • Nonrecourse just means that only the collateral is up for claim.
      • Recourse loans have lower rates. So lenders want recourse for risky individuals, whereas they’re fine with non-recourse for good borrowers bc they get more interest.
    • Marc Rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich. Alleged criminal, tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering. Was a trader, pm, etc.
    • SharesPost was a PE marketplace. They were acquired by Forge.
    • SecondMarket was a PE marketplace as well. They were acquired by NASDAQ, becoming NASDAQ Private Markets (NPM). SharesPost was in the original deal, but ultimately it became just NASDAQ.
    • Bloomberg Wealth with David Rubenstein.
    • Remember the simple differences of debt financing vs equity financing. Say your company needs money to grow. Debt = taking out a loan. Equity = standard investor round, giving stock for money.
    • LIBOR = London Interbank Offered Rate. It is an interest rate which (international) banks use to lend to each other (which is what the FED uses to increase/decrease rates, since it trickles to the rest of the economy). It is the benchmark for interest rates globally.
      • Until being phased out in 2021 for the better SOFR = Secured Overnight Financing Rate.
      • SOFR is at 2.27% today. There have been step jumps corresponding to the fed hikes this year so far to manage inflation.
    • Risk Weighted Assets = RWAs. Total assets, but proportional to risk. For example: a US treasury bond is less risky than a credit card.
    • Basel III is an accord to prevent insolvency; regulations for stuff like reserve capital for banks internationally. Basel IV will come out in 2023.
      • Tier 1 Capital is the primary reserves, used for business activities and clients. Usually it’s cash and equity. It’s the most liquid. CET1 (Common Equity Tier 1) is the primary portion of Tier 1.
      • Tier 2 Capital is basically the misc bucket of last reserves. It could be many different types of instruments, but all less liquid and less reliable.
      • All of Tier 1+2 reserves must be >=10.5% of all RWAs.
    • Remember equity/stock warrants are basically just options. Few differences:
      • They’re issued by the company. Not just traded on a secondary market.
      • Usually used for the company to raise money, not give away existing equity.
      • When a warrant is exercised, new stock is created (which dilutes the existing).
      • They’re longer term.
    • NAV financing. Net Asset Value.
      • It’s when you borrow against your own portfolio, basically.
      • Say I run a decent-sized PE fund. Pledge that as collateral to take out a loan that I put back into the fund?
      • Can be used to distribute liquidity back to LPs right away, invest in new opportunities, etc.
    • Arch Labs (https://archlabs.com/) is an admin/manager for PE. Helping with investments, connecting with the back office teams, assisting taxes, whatever.
    • Remember that the ability to unstake eth will not be ready until a release after the merge. This is the Shanghai upgrade, and could be a year after 2.0. You can still unstake through all the liquid staking services like lido. They give you a synthetic that you can convert back to the main asset (effectively withdrawing).
    • Tokenized stock revisit.
      • Remember you get all the benefits of blockchain/crypto/web3 with the backing of fiat assets: can trade 24/7, FEX, move around at will, without coordinating with other humans, fractionalize to whatever resolution you want, etc.
      • Caveat – different tickers on different exchanges (although could happen with fiat too).
      • You get tons of infrastructure for free: voting via DAOs instead of shareholder/board meetings, dividends via streaming protocols instead of fiat payment rails, more.
      • Existing marketplaces: FTX and Mirror.
      • Sounds like Templum (https://www.templuminc.com/) is looking to provide something like marketplace-as-a-service and they support tokenized stocks as well.
    • Activated business cards for Mahlstedt LLC and submitted (1) membership authorizations to manage the accounts (2) substitute w-9 for business signature card. Since I’m platinum honors tier, there will be no monthly fees. Activated online banking and set up automatic payments.
    • This round of student loan relief will cost govt ~300b.